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I love my job. I am one of these people who looks forward to going to work. I am a pedantic irritating geek who cannot stop correcting other’s spelling or grammatical mistakes. I have no tolerance for ‘SMS’-speak and I cannot abide the lazy, contracted pigeon English that my language is becoming. And don’t give me any crap about the constant linguistic evolution and dynamism of lingual entity, you are preaching to the converted. Growth and progress are one thing; de-evolution is something else entirely.
I get paid to explain words to classes full of (mostly female) students; my boss actually gives me money to correct their mistakes.
The world of ESL (English as a Second Language) is a strange eclectic place full of rejects, bums, dropouts, social misfits, wanderers and outcasts. There is an old addage in my line of work that ‘people become English Teachers when they have fucked-up their lives’, and there is more than a grain of truth to this saying. Here in Taiwan there are all kinds of failed businessmen, hopeless itinerants, drapetomaniacs, dromomaniacs, and the vast swathes of the terminally unemployable (of which I count myself as a member). We are employed on the basis that we can speak English. My sole qualification is that I speak my native language. It is a job that anyone can do, I have no special skills, no abilities that set me apart from others, no speciality, or any other kind of occupational redeeming features of any kind. There is no real oppourtunity for promotion (aside from running a school), I do not get holiday pay, do not work ‘regular’ hours and my schedule changes from month-to-month.

However, I cannot imagine doing anything else. I live on a tropical island, pay 6% tax, eat out every night and never wake up in the mornings dreading my day.

Well, except for Saturdays. Saturday is my day of hell, my nightmare. I was beginning to hate Friday nights too, just because they are so close to Saturdays, and my Sundays were often ruined in the aftermath of the Saturday that preceeded them. 10am, a class of 15 eight to thirteen year-olds who are undisciplined, naughty and EVIL, just evil. 3.30pm, a class of one, or sometimes two, even younger students who often cry and wet their pants. They hide my tea, steal my marker pens and the A/C remote contol. They call me ‘big-nosed westerner’, they refuse to do what I say and demand to play games for the whole of each 80 minute lesson. They constantly demand attention, expect to be entertained and they piss me off from start to finish. I hate them, all of them. Not because I hate Taiwanese children; they are actually much better behaved than English kids, I just hate children.
They don’t want to be there and are not at all interested in learning English, it is only because their parents want them to have an early grasp of the language.
I am an English teacher, not a goddamned play leader. I am not a babysitter and I dont have a clue what to do if a child cries or shits himself. I am a VERY bad teacher of children. I will not even write about some of the terrible methods I have used to bribe kids into being quiet and doing some work, I would be too ashamed.

But, thank God, Jesus, Allah and Jehovah, I have taught my last saturday lesson. After over 3 months of complaining (both by me to my boss, and by the parents of the kids I teach to my boss), I have been taken off the teaching equivalent of spud-bashing. Now I am strictly a Monday to Friday boy, teaching only adults who want to be in class. No more shitty desparate days when I count the seconds to the end of the lesson. No more horrifying moments when, with 45 minutes still left, I stand there and think, ‘what the HELL am I going to teach these small people?’.
And no more shitty pants and screaming tears (at leat not at work).
Rejoice with me my friends, today my life got even better.

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